At ‘24,’ before any episode shoots, there are many, many meetings that happen during an episode’s prep (preparation) time. We shoot two episodes at a time. So while Episodes 19 and 20 are in production, two more are being prepped. The first meeting we have for each new story is the Concept Meeting. It allows the writers of the episode to explain their reasoning behind any given scene of the episode to the director and crew. It also allows the crew to ask their first round of questions so that they can go off and start planning out how to conquer the production of each scene. Every Department Head and many other key players come to the Concept Meeting.

A video shows the crew interacting in the concept meeting.

Both Geoff and Jessica Petelle (Producer’s assistant) had their Flip cameras on hand for 21’s get-together. The “Concept” scripts are usually in a slightly rougher stage because it’s almost always a writers’ first draft script, and they’re a little more grand in scale because the budget police (a.k.a. our producer Michael Klick and UPM Craig West) haven’t stormed the Writers’ Room castle yet… so a sense of humor is key.

We had this concept meeting on our United Nations set because we were using our office’s conference room as the Bank Vault set in Episode 19.

A video shows Petelle showing the bank vault that Cole Ortiz and Dana Walsh visit to get Dana's evidence for Jack Bauer. She reveals that the set is merely in the writer's offices.